New TLDs almost ready

Filed under: — 12:56 am

ICANN has completed negotiations for the .BIZ and .INFO domain suffixes, and pundits are expecting a land rush. I’m not so sure. I think there are only three groups of businesses that will really be excited about these new domain suffixes:

  • Companies that already have domains will snap up their counterparts (i.e. microsoft.biz and microsoft.info) to defend their trademarks.
  • “Dot-com” businesses will buy the .BIZ and .INFO equivalents to avoid the dot-com stigma.
  • Tiny companies will register the new names in cases where the .COM equivalent is already taken, likely by a speculator who isn’t using it.

Come to think of it, that might amount to a lot of people. Probably enough to reduce the .INFO and .BIZ namespaces to the same used-up shells as .COM and .NET. What’s the point?

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(c) 2001-2007 Michael Moncur. All rights reserved, but feel free to quote me.
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